End of Days

Lydia Lozen Magruderthe great-granddaughter of a female Apache war-shamanhas seen visions of the End since childhood. She has constructed a massive ranch-fortress in the American Southwest, stocked with everything necessary to rebuild civilization.

Now her visions are coming true. John Stone, once a baseball star and now a famous gonzo journalist,

Hardcover

Item is available through our marketplace sellers.

Overview

Lydia Lozen Magruderthe great-granddaughter of a female Apache war-shamanhas seen visions of the End since childhood. She has constructed a massive ranch-fortress in the American Southwest, stocked with everything necessary to rebuild civilization.

Now her visions are coming true. John Stone, once a baseball star and now a famous gonzo journalist, stumbled across a plan to blast humanity back to the Stone Age. Then he vanished. Lydia's only hope of tracking him down lies with her stubborn, globe-trotting daughter Kate, Stone's former lover.

Meanwhile, a Russian general obsessed with nuclear Armageddon has also disappeared...as have eight or more of his Russian subs, armed with nuclear-tipped missiles.

In Robert Gleason's End of Days, the world is armed for self-destruction. Who will survive?

Advertising

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Gleason's work with Junius Podrug on such novels as Apocalypse 2012 and The 2012 Codes has made him an expert on all things apocalyptic, a subject he returns to with gusto in this wildly expansive tale of the coming End Times. Among the principal characters are John Stone, gonzo journalist; Kate Magruder, Stone's ex-girlfriend, whose mother uses her media empire to warn the world about the oncoming nuclear Armageddon and who has built a fortress, the Citadel, where she intends to wait out the war; and Ronald "Cool Breeze" Robinson, a new prisoner in the notorious Texas prison known as Jack Town. And then there are the more bizarre characters: a massive, singing rat known as Sailor, the story's real hero; semi-sentient nuclear weapons; and scores of madmen, killers, sadists, torturers, and evildoers bent on the earth's destruction. It all adds up to a thrilling take on a frighteningly possible future, one that makes the journey in Cormac McCarthy's The Road look like a stroll through the park. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Gleason, an executive editor for Tor/Forge, has also written a number of apocalyptic thrillers, including, with Junius Podrug, the continuation of the Gary Jennings's Aztec series, Aztec Fire. His latest thriller tackles the issues of nuclear terrorism and destruction. Media magnate Lydia Magruder, the great-granddaughter of a female Apache shaman, has had apocalyptic visions since childhood. Now she and her reporter daughter, Kate, are trying to find John Stone, Kate's ex-lover and a freelance journalist who may have uncovered a plot to launch a nuclear Armageddon. Featuring a multilayered story line typical of such thrillers, the book includes many military and scientific details to add verisimilitude to Gleason's story. VERDICT Fans of such nuclear apocalyptic fiction as Nevil Shute's On the Beach will enjoy this exciting addition to the genre.—Joel W. Tscherne, Bryant & Stratton Coll., Eastlake, OH

From the Publisher

“Gleason's work with Junius Podrug on such novels as Apocalypse 2012 and The 2012 Code has made him an expert on all things apocalyptic, a subject he returns to with gusto in this wildly expansive tale of the coming End Times...It all adds up to a thrilling take on a frighteningly possible future, one that makes the journey in Cormac McCarthy's The Road look like a stroll through the park.” Publishers Weekly (starred review) on End of Days

“What an amazing story, sweeping in scope, terrifying, uplifting, outrageous, funny, and shocking, forming an unforgettable picture of humanity's 'end of days.'...A story for the ages.” Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of Impact

Related Subjects

Read an Excerpt

1 They Won’t Know It Was Missing …

“Yo, Katy, how’s it hanging? Thought I’d send you a memento mori, just to let you know I’m thinking of you.”Stone was on her phone screen, smiling and waving at the camera.Kate Magruder hit “pause”—freezing his grin on the screen. It was hard to believe that three years ago they’d been lovers, partners—a team.She sighed. It seemed a million years ago.In another hour Stacy would make Kate up, and she would be on TV—her special news report from Mecca. In the portable makeup mirror on her folding camp table, she studied her face with professional detachment. At age thirty-six, she had her mother’s mouth and high Apache cheekbones, framing her father’s emerald eyes. Her reddish blond hair she wore straight down her back, and her figure—still athletic from decades of running, weight workouts, and Tae Kwon Do—drew more than its share of wolf whistles.But she took no pride in her appearance. She’d always viewed good looks—hers, anyone’s—as physical fraudulence, a diversion from the person within.“Whoever the hell that is,” she grumbled to the mirror.Maybe that was what she’d seen in John Stone. He put no one on pedestals. His nickname for her had been Beauty—which he’d always intoned with a sneer—and he’d goaded her continually about her now-famous face.“Your looks may stop some men’s clocks, but not mine. Around here we work for a living. Get the picture, Spoiled Rich Girl? Pick up those mikes and cameras. Get the lead out. We have a shoot and a story to cover.”And stories they had covered—every war, famine, earthquake, and plague planet Earth had to offer—for four long years. She’d been his camera operator and sound woman, then rewrote his copy, then coauthored the news stories.He’d been a bastard—but without bullshit. And he’d seen her for what she was—a consummate pro, not just a pretty face.For that she had loved him.She still loved him.Oh, John, where are you now?Where did it all go wrong?Not that he was hard to look at. She wished he’d gotten his nose fixed after she’d dragged him bleeding out of a biker bar in East L.A. As usual, he needed a haircut. She also wished he’d get a new wardrobe. Bush jackets and fatigues were hardly her idea of haute couture. Lean, rangy, she guessed he was still fit. Maybe as fit as when he’d won fourteen straight for the Yankees his rookie year and taken them to the Series. Ordinarily, she would have muttered an obscenity about his conceited smirk, except the grin now bothered her in a way she couldn’t explain to herself.Something about the eyes.Kate sat down on her cot. She couldn’t sleep. Even when she wasn’t playing the video of John Stone, it was playing in her mind. Memento mori. Remember that you shall die. It was just like Stone to send her a message wrapped in a riddle. Stone was afraid of nothing, but there was something in his voice.Wind attacked her tent, and she peeked out the flap as the bloody dawn rose over the city. Mecca sprawled like a wrinkled old woman in a wadi, a dry river-bed carved between steep hills. The muezzins’ morning call to prayer from the minarets towering over the city’s mosques sang to her on the stinging wind. Their song, for Kate, summoned the ghosts of Islamic holy warriors past, a wail for the Mahdi-Messiah to redeem the True Believers and restore Dar-al-Islam—“the Domain of Islam”—to its rightful place on Mohammed’s earth and in Allah’s paradise, to punish the wicked and reward the righteous.Answering the call of the criers, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came out of the tents that surrounded the city and prostrated themselves in the direction of the black draped Ka’ba, the House of Abraham in the heart of the city. Kate knew that many of the Muslims on earth, more than a billion people, were at this moment facing in her direction as they answered the call of the muezzins to embrace Mecca and praise Allah. She ducked back inside the tent, reminding herself that she was one of the infidels.They were here to cover the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mohammed’s birthplace that attracted millions of Muslims each year. Vladimir Malokov, Russia’s minister of defense, had been her ostensible reason for coming to Mecca. He had converted to Islam, was in Mecca for his hajj, and despite her mother’s wishes, the Saudi government—sensing in his pilgrimage a PR bonanza—had granted Kate and MTN exclusive coverage of the event. But her real reason was the concern raised by Stone’s video. Stone claimed he was unearthing “the scoop of the century.”She flopped back down on the army cot and picked up the phone. Stone was one of the few people who mattered to her. He was the best reporter the gods ever created. Stone and Kate had been through some hairy stuff together. Genocide in Africa and the Balkans. Invading a Cuban gulag to search for a gun-toting nun.“You’re a man to ride the river with,” Stone told her in an exaggerated Texas drawl after she’d covered his back in that biker bar after he pissed off guys who thought MAC-10s and rattlesnake tattoos were fashion statements.Kate backed up the video and hit “play” again. Stone’s curly black hair and raptor’s grin reappeared on the phone’s small screen.* * *“You thought your mom and I were a few bricks shy on the subject of nuclear proliferation. Well, after my last foray into the Land of Loose Nukes I couldn’t resist proving you wrong. Catch a glimpse of the Russian nuclear storage facility behind me.”* * *Behind Stone was a paint-blistered storage building. Untended, unguarded.* * *“As you can see from the rickety fence, the absence of guards—or any personnel at all, in spite of the fact that this shed is a high-security installation warehousing several tons of bomb-grade nuclear fuel—we can walk right in now and help ourselves to any of the containers, then waltz out the way we came. How can we be so sure? you ask. Because we did just that.”* * *The camera moved in tight on two small slate-gray steel drums.* * *“One of the drums is filled with bomb-grade plutonium, the other enriched bomb-grade uranium. Each weighs around fifty pounds—containing enough for an Hiroshima and a Nagasaki bomb blast. Easy for me to carry out.”* * *The camera panned to the fence and the side of the building.* * *“How can this be happening? The Russian economy is in chaos. The guards and workers are gone because they haven’t been paid in months. They’re out hustling for food, heating oil, medicine, and gasoline—anything to make ends meet.“Not that anybody would want to hang around these installations even if they were well-paid. There is no money for upkeep or even safety inspections. Consequently, these installations are death traps.”* * *The camera panned the interior of Stone’s nearby hotel room. In the middle of the room sat his drum of nuclear materials.* * *“Well, Katy, I know what you’re wondering now. How is that maniac going to get that stuff out of the drum? No prob-lem-o. As long as I don’t ingest the shit, it’s perfectly safe. So first I open this drum with my trusty hacksaw.”* * *The camera closed in on Stone’s trusty hacksaw.* * *“Then I can scoop it up with my bare hands and shove it into the cargo pockets of my shirt and fatigue pants. Because … alpha rays don’t pass through skin!“By the way, I can squeeze enough into my pockets for a couple of bombs. You don’t need boxcars full of this stuff to build a good fissile bomb. A piece of high-grade nuclear fuel the size of your fist is all you’d need.“Getting it through airports, seaports, and border checkpoints, you ask? Ha! Russia has no money for detection devices.“Now you’re thinking: ‘Okay, asshole. You were foolish enough to swipe some stuff from an unguarded installation. What are you going to do with it? You need nuclear weapons scientists to turn that stuff into a bomb.’“Wrong again, Katy dear.”* * *The video cut to a photo of an old Civil War cannon.* * *“All I have to do is sneak up some dark night on one of the innumerable Civil War cannons, and with an acetylene torch cut off a hunk of cannon six feet long.“Or I can just buy a hunk from an ordnance plant—the easier course.“In any event, I weld one end shut, load it with a piece of the enriched uranium we just stole, then pack the other end with more dynamite or gunpowder—and wham! We blast our uranium bullet into the uranium at the cannon barrel’s far end. Guess what we have? The Hiroshima ‘gun-barrel bomb.’ The genius of this baby is that it’s foolproof. Any moron can make it work. The guys at the American Manhattan Project—not to be confused with that gaggle of State Department morons who ran our ‘Pakistani Manhattan Project’—were so confident of the old gun-barrel design they never tested it. Well, actually they did, if you want to be technical. The test site was Hiroshima.“Now if you want to do some real testing, it really isn’t all that hard. Get a ball of plutonium, encase it in a spherical steel jacket lined with C-4, crimp fifty or sixty blasting caps around it—all uniformly placed—wire them up to a single electrical source, and throw the switch. You may want to test it a couple of times with a conventional explosive, but it will work. Trust me. It worked at Nagasaki.“And no, this isn’t the only nuclear shit exiting Mother Russia. ‘Mad Vlad’ Malokov reports a dozen Kilo-Class subs, over one hundred suitcase nukes, and a sizable assortment of cruise missiles are currently on their misplaced list. In other words, these weapons have gone over the hill.“Time to go. Don’t worry. I’m going to return this stuff to the place I stole it from. Otherwise they won’t know it was missing. I’ll leave it on the front porch. No one knows what these storage sites contain. There’s no bookkeeping.“So you can see, Katy dear, the shit’s so easy to obtain you have to assume that noisy neighbor of yours is now a nuclear player. I know you’ve sometimes been skeptical of your mom and me, but the Global Arms Race from Hell is on.”* * *Kate turned off the video and sighed.She’d seen something she’d never expected to see.John Stone was scared.Maybe it had to do with Vlad. Many people thought he was extremely dangerous. He wasn’t called “Mad Vlad” for nothing. He’d also earned the name Vlad the Impaler during the Chechnya War when he’d staked dead prisoners on posts lining the main street into Grozny.There were rumors he’d had the men impaled alive.He was wealthy beyond dreams of avarice, and so far the ineffective Russian bureaucracy had been unable to remove him from office.If Vlad was in Mecca, Stone wouldn’t be far away.She got up, donned her pilgrim’s robes and veil.What are you trying to tell me, John?She already knew about Russia’s nuclear yard sale. Her mother’s media empire was now dedicated to warning the world about nuclear Armageddon, which had earned her considerable ridicule, including the nickname “the Nuclear Noah,” particularly after she built her Fortress–bomb shelter she called “the Citadel” in the middle of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert.When Stone came to share her dementia, her mother—known to her friends as L. L.—had shipped him off to the ends of the world. In Russia, China, and the Middle East in particular, L. L. and Stone had chased every rumor of Planet Earth’s imminent demise.Kate didn’t believe any of their paranoia, but still the video bothered her.There was also the letter she’d received from Stone the week before—from an area in Central Asia so remote the envelope had four different postmarks. His letter sounded a little crazy, haunted, and, she believed now, scared. She’d perused his letter a hundred times.It read like a last will and testament for the human race.Kate shut her eyes. Arab music began as the haunting voices of the muezzins faded. She had thought music was illegal during Ramadan.Personally, she would have been happy to outlaw it the year around. She hated desert music with its endlessly repeating, jarringly discordant refrains.Memento mori, Stone said to her. Remember that you shall die. In the Middle Ages people wore a skull on a necklace and periodically looked at it to remind themselves that death was waiting.But whose death was Stone talking about?

Meet the Author

ROBERT GLEASON is a bestselling author and highly regarded expert on nuclear terrorism and the no-man's-land between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. An executive editor at Tor/Forge Books, he has been featured on many national talk shows, including The Sean Hannity Show and Lou Dobbs Tonight. He also appeared on the History Channel's two-hour special, Prophets of Doom.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Reads as if Quentin Tarantino & the Devil were perched on Robert Gleason's shoulder, urging him on.
Best parts are the submarine scenes: best I've read since Clancy. And I liked Sailor the Rat, too...

Rob_Ballister

More than 1 year ago

Robert Gleason's END OF DAYS is a chilling (and thankfully fictitious account) of the cataclysmic end of the world, and the resulting struggle for mankind's survival. It is interesting, shocking, violent, scary and entertaining all at the same time. It does however need more polish before I would categorize it as "good."
The old Soviet Union's nuclear weapons are available for the taking, either on the black market or just by stealing them from the hundreds of unguarded, unsecure storage sites throughout the world. Some fear that this will lead to a worldwide proliferation of nukes, and begin to prepare for Armageddon while trying to convince others that the end is coming. The doomsday prophecies come true when suitcase nuclear weapons are detonated at the same time as "Russian" subs begin launching nuclear cruise missiles at major cities all over the world. The rest of the world immediately begs the US to lead a response before it's too late, but the acting US president (much of the National Command Authority was killed when Washington DC was nuked) is weak and won't respond. Nuclear explosions continue to rock the world, and eventually the US military acts without authority and responds with nuclear strikes of its own. By the time it comes to light that the Russians were framed by a small middle-eastern country, the Motherland's major cities are already glowing with nuclear fallout. The world plunges into chaos.
In the United States, militias bond together for survival, as do large numbers of convicts now free from their incarceration (and who for some reason have been preparing for this very moment). Eventually their ranks grow to the tens of thousands, and they too have liberated nuclear weapons. It seems the killing isn't over.
Those are the books more chillingly believable parts. A number of of interesting story lines are developed, but probably one too many for a truly coherent story. In addition to a beautiful reporter who seems to be trying to get herself killed to prove her worth to her billionaire-Armageddonist mother, there is the white supremacist, the Mexican gang leader, and a reborn Malcolm X. There are two generals, a space station, an AI presence that can see all, and several rats that seem to speak with each other as if they went to the Ivy League. Through in a pair of sex-crazed sisters who are insatiable both in their lust for sex and torture, and things start to get a little less "real."
Finally, the climax involves three heroes who were once on the NY Yankees as the team won six consecutive championships before they went their separate ways. One became a Pulitzer winning journalist; one a drug dealer serving three consecutive life sentences, and one an Air Force General. They meet up again just in time to prevent the bad guys from nuking mankind's best hope to rebuild. Now we are into pure entertainment.
Overall, it was an entertaining read, though a bit on the long-winded side at 490+ pages. There's plenty of foul language, sexuality, torture, violence, blood, animal cruelty, suffering and despair. There is also some dark humor, some likeable characters, and enough discussion of Armageddon to at least make you think about it.
Not a waste of time, but probably not award winning material either.

harstan

More than 1 year ago

Ancestor of a Shaman, media mogul Lydia Lozen Magruder has had visions of the End of Days for years. When she built the Citadel on the southwest desert and dedicated her media empire to warn of the coming end of civilization, everyone even her daughter Kate assumes she is a lunatic.
L.L. becomes concerned that the countdown has begun when Houston reports a problem. Her ace reporter John Stone has been investigating a Russian general who vanished along with numerous nuclear subs, and a terrorist scheme to prove Einstein right that the fourth world war will have soldiers using stone age weapons. Stone like the Russian officer has vanished. L.L. asks Kate to find her former boyfriend John while warning her daughter that the countdown to nuclear Armageddon has started.
This is an exciting over the top but entertaining thriller. Besides L.L. who holds the story line together, the zillion secondary players include lunatics like the aptly named Chaplain and two brutal Mideast princesses as well as heroes like sailor and innocent like the population of Manhattan. It takes one nut with a paranoid Pygmalion Effect belief to cause the beginning of the End of Days. Fans will enjoy this thought provoking tale as readers will compare the Citadel to what led to destruction of the world in Nevil Shute's On the Beach.
Harriet Klausner

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

This was a good book but 1700 + pages was just too long. For instance, it took a full page on my nook to describe food on a table. Much could be edited from this book to make it a better read. All in all though, it's a good read, if you can skip over the lenghty prose.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

CCLOWES-CAB

More than 1 year ago

Robert Gleason did a great job writing this book, all 500 pages. It is well written, well researched and thought provoking. In addition, it is imaginative and spell binding with lots of action. The cast of characthers are creative and well developed. I was intregued with the talking rat "sailor" and the talking missiles and warheads, nuns, sisters, NYC, nuclear invasion and how it all came together in one novel. I would recimmend this book to anyhone, even those with a slight interest in nuclear invasion and end of world scenarios. There is something to be learned here!

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

A truly good novel not only entertains, it jolts us out of our smug
complacency and takes us kicking and screaming to another dimension. End
of Days certainly does that. Gleason&rsquo;s creativity, vivid imagination,
and vision grabs you on every page, and the reader is forced to confront
the reality that what seems impossible might instead be probable. This
tour de force of a novel kept me up past my bedtime on too many nights,
and it left me thinking hard all day about what his frightening vision,
should it occur, portends for the human race.

grumpydan

More than 1 year ago

For an almost 500 page book, it really goes nowhere and everywhere at the same time. With a huge cast of characters, including a rat, you never get to appreciate them as individuals. The characters and situations were unbelievable. This is a story about the annihilation of the world and to tell you the truth I didn't care.